6 Ways Your Sense of Smell Is Secretly Controlling Your Mind

#3. Change Your Moods

Maybe it's not a vivid memory that assaults you out of nowhere, but a feeling, or a mood. You're sitting there, minding your own business, when suddenly you're overcome with dread, or anxiety, or anger. Once again, there's a good chance a faint smell is at play, triggering your subconscious.

Bad smells not only decrease how well people do at complex tasks, but also have a negative effect as severe as you'd get from exposing people to a distracting noise. Well, duh, you say. So people couldn't concentrate because they were distracted by the stench. That's why it's so hard to study on public transportation! But the point is that the smells had the effect even when at such a low level that the subjects couldn't consciously detect them. We're telling you, it's like mind control over here.

GettyFun fact: An angry grizzly smells a lot like you pooping yourself.

But the connection between smell and emotion gets stranger still. Your sense of smell can actually ...

#2. Drive You Crazy

There are many things generally accepted as risk factors for depression: genetic predisposition, bad diet, lack of exercise, living in Oregon. But there's another depression predictor that's less well-known: how well you can smell things.

You would think that people who develop anosmia, or lack of smell, get off relatively easy in the big scheme of things. At least visiting public toilets must be easier, and that pretty much cancels out the bad stuff, right? But anosmic people have a high risk of severe depression, and it's not just because they're sad about losing one of their five senses. It's much weirder than that.

And if that doesn't have you nervously sniffing the air to find out whether you'll want to get out of bed tomorrow, a bad sense of smell and small olfactory bulb are also correlated with schizophrenia.

GettyDon't tell him, but that painting is made out of ketchup.

But How?

That is how strongly your moods are tied to your sense of smell. Scientists don't perfectly understand the link between sense of smell and mental illness, but we know that depression and schizophrenia both involve persistently flat moods. Apparently if one link in that chain that connects smell and emotions breaks, the whole thing falls apart. Or it could work in the other direction -- if your sense of smell disappears after a lifetime of smell/emotion connection, and all of these subconscious emotional triggers disappear along with it, the flat numbness that results could bring about the depression.

Whatever the connection, it's so strong that scientists are now making "scratch and sniff" tests to predict people's future risks for schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other illnesses. No, really.

"No, ham! I meant ham!"

#1. Make You More Attractive (But Not in the Way You Think)

Entire multibillion dollar industries are built upon the idea that smelling good gets you dates (smell can also influence who you're attracted to). But when we say that your sense of smell can make a man more attractive to the ladies, we're not just pointing out that a quick sniff test of one's clothing before heading out is a reliable start on the path of not dying alone. And we're not talking about those pheromone sprays that promise to make women ignore the crumbs caught in your neckbeard.

No, this is weirder.

Photos.comBecause horse souls smell like fucking.

In a recent study conducted by the University of Liverpool, they had some guys spray themselves with Lynx (the English version of Axe Body Spray). Then they had women rate the men's attractiveness ... via videotape. As in, they were out of smelling range. The men who sprayed themselves down were still rated as more attractive, even though the women couldn't smell them.

But How?

According to the scientists running the experiment, the power was inside the men the whole time. The guys given the scented spray figured they smelled good, so their body language displayed more confidence, and the women who watched them responded to that.

So does this mean these dudes were just brainwashed by Lynx's marketing campaign? They actually believed the ads that claim spraying this stuff will have women diving for their junk?

Nope -- the can of spray used in the experiment was unmarked, so the men had no idea what kind of deodorant they were covering themselves with. It seems like pretty much anything that doesn't actually smell like mustard gas will do the trick. It turns out the amazing mind-control powers of smell aren't about making the girl at the bar swoon -- it's about tricking yourself into having a little confidence for once.